Joe must go: Penn State best served in erasing his name, likeness from campus

View full sizeExpress-Times Photo | JIM DEEGANA mound of trinkets and mementos pile up around the Joe Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium just days after his death in January.

It won’t be long now.

Sometime between today and Sept. 1, look for the dismantling of the Joe Paterno monument outside Beaver Stadium at Penn State University.

It has to be.

Former Florida State football coach and legendary figure himself, Bobby Bowden, said it best last week.

As long as the life-sized casting of Paterno stands along Curtin Road, index finger raised in presumed triumph, it will serve as an emblem of the institutional failure and shame the Jerry Sandusky scandal exposed.

It will be a lasting reminder of the pain inflicted on the victims of sexual abuse. It will serve as a symbol of confusion for the thousands of men molded under Paterno now struggling to reconcile their experiences with stunning facts about the cover-up for a child predator.

And it will be a mark of regret for the hundreds of thousands of alumni and other fans who lionized the Hall of Fame coach.

Leaving the monument, perhaps, wouldn’t be a bad thing, so as never to forget the complete disregard and missteps that brought a once-vaunted institution of higher learning to its knees.

But if there’s any lesson taken from this scandal, it’s how the culture of power and image drove officials to malfeasance.

Penn State will be protective of its image — it is, after all, how the school’s leadership steered into this awful storm in the first place — and the likeness of Paterno outside the stadium he patrolled for 61 years will conjure images and commentary that will only prolong the wounds.

It says here that the statue will come down before the first home game of the season, Sept. 1, if someone doesn’t take matters into their own hands before then.

View full sizeExpress-Times Photo | JIM DEEGANCandles pay tribute to Paterno in January at the statue just outside Beaver Stadium.

Many writers have likened the dizzying pace of developments in the scandal, and Paterno’s fall from the summit of career success, to a Greek tragedy. Anyone plucked from the planet last November and reinserted in the present-day would be disbelieving. And who could blame them?

Paterno wasn’t the only Penn State leader who should have acted to boot Sandusky from Penn State and report him immediately to the authorities. But with a lifetime of lessons dispensed and from his perch as the most powerful man on campus, he is the one we most expected to do so.

He did not. This was more than a singular mistake.

More than once last week I thought of the throng outside Paterno’s State College home the night trustees ousted him as coach, and his feeble exhortation to “Pray for those victims.”

If only he had done something for them when it mattered.

The Freeh report shows Paterno lied to a grand jury. He knew of an investigation into Sandusky in 1998. He knew Sandusky showered with a child and had done things that Mike McQueary could not even bring himself to speak of in 2001.

He had discussed with other leaders what to do about the 2001 episode, and when they decided to report Sandusky, the Freeh report shows, Paterno intervened. No report was made. No one tried to track down the victim.

Years of sexual abuse of children by Sandusky followed.

Like it or not, Paterno was an enabler. Penn State won’t move past that until his vestiges vanish: the mural, his name on the library, the "peachy" ice cream at The Creamery that also bears his name.